faded hearts
by our dancing days
Summary: Some nights, as they lie between sheets that have been white-washed and faded and hang too loosely, they realise that things like gods and angels don't exist - they are humans and they are fragile and they are flawed. / James, Sirius, and their fall from the heavens. for ella & hpfc.


**Title: **faded hearts

**Summary: **Some nights, as they lie between sheets that have been white-washed and faded and hang too loosely, they realise that things like gods and angels don't exist - they are humans and they are fragile and they are flawed. / James, Sirius, and their fall from the heavens. for ella & hpfc.

**Prompts: **glass, knocked down, wishes, 'Stars' from Les Misérables, "I am half agony, half hope." - Jane Austen, loyalty.

**Notes: **This was written for Allie as part of the fabulous Big Sis, Lil Sis Competition and also for Camp Potter's activity - Archery. And of course, a massive dedication to my little sister and wife, Ella, and her fantastic fiction - _vivid hearts. _You should all go and check it out.

This is mainly JamesSirius, with obvious hints of RemusSirius, LilyRemus, and JamesLily. Peter watches creepily from the sidelines. It's severely angsty, and I sincerely hope you enjoy!

* * *

"_And so it has been and so it is written__  
__On the doorway to paradise__  
__That those who falter and those who fall__  
__Must pay the price!"_  
- 'Stars', Les Misérables.

* * *

"Prongs," he whispers, cold and aureolin and quiet. The room is dark and though Sirius ignites the end of his cigarette, it burns out and the ashes fall like glass and angels. He taps a loose rhythm on the stone floor and the cold dances under his skin.

These stars don't shine, not for them; not for these twisted marionettes who cower under streetlights. They have fallen from grace and their strings can't hold them now.

"What, Padfoot?"

He lights another cigarette and this time, the flame burns too fast and too bright and it is gone before he can put the ashes to his lips.

"Why me?"

The tapping stops. The world continues to turn, the air doesn't get any warmer and the night doesn't get any darker, but all Sirius can hear is the frantic pounding in his head and the voices that whisper _not good enough, not good enough. _

He has fallen from God, now - fallen from the grace of his family and his friends and now he's not _Handsome Sirius _or even that _Gryffindor Black, _he's nobody and nothing. Just_ Sirius Who Always Messes Up. _

"You're my best mate," James replies, turning over to face him. His hair is dark and ruffled and his eyes shine black. "And I wanted you to stop hating yourself."

Sirius gets up and stumbles, bare feet cold on the ground. This time, his third cigarette burns dully and he clenches his shaking fingertips around it until it almost breaks. He holds it to his mouth, breathing in the smoke and the poison and filling the darkness with a breath that will never be caught again.

The light flares and flickers and dies.

He breathes in deeply and feels the guilt settle on his lungs. "And you thought this would be the best way to do it?" How fucking loyal.

James rubs his neck and sighs. "Well... yeah."

Sirius laughs bitterly and takes another drag of his cigarette. He wants something stronger, but even he knows that any more adrenalin and he'll be (knocked down) jumping off the fucking tower. No wings will save him now. "Well that was bloody poetic, mate. No wonder you can't get Evans," he drawls.

"Shut up, Padfoot," James growls in return, but he just leans back on the greying makeshift bed, resting his head on his arms and not even shivering from the cold.

His glasses have been discarded somewhere, probably hidden underneath one of their pairs of school trousers or a Gryffindor tie that was neither of theirs in the first place. His feet peek out of the blankets and Sirius thinks he's fucking beautiful.

"Cheers, then," Sirius says offhandedly, standing up slowly and stretching, lips still curled around the dying cigarette. He watches James watch him and he relishes in it. "Take a picture," he grins.

James hums, eyes glazing over. "That I might," he says with a smirk. Sirius slowly puts on his trousers, taking longer than usual to do up his belt buckle, but by the time he looks back up, James is dressed and somewhere else.

Always somewhere else.

"You got somewhere to be?" he asks gruffly, eyes skimming over skin and scars and bruises.

_That's the way boys are, _a woman's voice echoes.

"Head Boy duties," James murmurs in return, ruffling his hair and making it stick up artfully. With a wordless flick, his glasses fly back into his hand, and he grins. Sirius swallows and it feels like glass.

"With the Head Girl," he states dully.

_It should've been Lily, _they whisper, over and over, _hurricane girl and inferno boy. It should've been them. _

James shrugs, and there's a clatter of footsteps, a whirlwind of clothes and the slam of a door before he's gone. Sirius is left alone. The tower is dark and the stone is grey; the calm chaos is gone and he is left with god awful _emptiness. _

This is all he has. And isn't it pitiful?

He is fine, for the most part. He grits his teeth and bared it, perhaps, and maybe he's a little quieter, a little less bold. He shines a little less bright. But after all, what does it matter? He's still the boy James fell in love with. Still the boy who fell in love with him.

He is dark like endings and the creeping cold of winter, like a _please, _like a_ but-, _like taking, like forever and always, crunched and buried in the dark dirt. It makes him sick, how the others cling to him like drowning people clawing at a life raft.

They scrape _brightcolouralive _nails against his _palecolddead _skin, brush dark tresses from his face like they don't belong, touch the space between his shoulder blades to see if his wings are there. Fallen angels don't have wings.

They fawn over him, press closer to him, whisper sweeter nothings in his ear. And this is their idea of _loyalty. _

Sirius has eyes like someone freshly buried, eyes that belong six feet under their high-heeled, sharp-toed shoes.

And still they lean over him, touch his neck - _look at those markings, like fingers - _and his followers' smiles falter just slightly, and they mutter incoherent nothings in his ear. He makes some joke to make them fall apart with laughter.

His eyes, though, are dark. Dark, not like brown or grey or blue, but dark like endings.

But still, they pepper him with praise and he wonders how they don't see it - the manic laughter, the insanity, the ugly beauty, the vanity, the _danger. _There is no love in that dark gaze.

His eyes are _dyingdyingdead _and he wonders, don't they think he looks like he's dying? He _is_, slowly, painfully, in the most selfish and horrific way - _with kindness. _They think they're saving him, the angel come to Earth to personify salvation and goodness and hope and light and eternal glory.

_Let them believe, _he thinks, _let them try._

Because angels don't just come to Earth; they have been knocked down, and as they fall, they think _why, _why would you let me?They plead and they beg as their wings are stripped from their backs.

This fallen angel personifies nothing but endings, and there is emptiness between his shoulder blades.

This Sirius Black is haunted; he is the lasting man standing. They say, _do not pity the dead, _and all that, but it doesn't mean anything. Death is triumphant; life is not. Only the good die young.

(Don't they have enough scars?)

All Sirius can see is USED, scrawled and gashed in blood and pain and glass and blades across his forearm, bumpy and horrific and so _Black. _He is new, in a sense - a teenager, not yet out of Hogwarts, and that has to count for something, it has to mean something, it has to -

He is used.

But he is fine, for the most part.

Sirius has fallen from grace as Lucifer fell from god and now he is a knocked down, broken mass of bones and flesh and laughter, resting at the bottom of a tower where he fucked his best friend because one was lonely, and the other is alone.

(How sad, darling.)

Some count their scars like stars in the sky, and they are the lucky ones. Some, like Sirius, doesn't know where one scar ends and the other begins. He wishes he did.

(This is the end, my love. Isn't it pitiful?)

In another room, in another tower, a red-headed girl is pulling on her jumper and another boy is lighting another cigarette.

They are marionettes and puppets, broken children born from war and revenge and love. Their strings have tangled with one another, only torn apart by scissors and scars. They have fallen so far and so hard that they can't hope to fly again.

* * *

Their eyes meet across the darkened room, and there are no sparks. It stays black, curtains drawn and windows shut.

"What are you doing, Padfoot?" Remus murmurs, defeated in the dark, as Sirius slides out of James' bed and pads his way across the floor. His shoulders are slumped with the weight of the world, and his feet catch on the carpet.

(Everyone imagines Lily dancing and falling into James' arms, not James sinking back into Sirius' - no one really cares about the truth.)

"Sleeping," he replies gruffly, and Remus' sigh is so dark and heavy, it makes him want to carve life into his bedposts so he won't feel so alone.

Remus crawls out of his bed and stumbles to sit on the greying windowsill, lighting a cigarette that doesn't burn as brightly as it should. If Sirius squints, he's sure he can see the silhouette of a glass angel's wings draped around his shoulders.

"You know what I mean. What are you doing?"

_JamesJamesJames _goes unwhispered between them but it's written on the glass and scratched on their skin, and _shit, _as though they care anymore.

He sits up in bed, fingers brushing over the paper skin on his wrists. "Those'll kill you, you know," he informs Remus quietly, drawing back the scarlet curtains that have long since faded. _Oh_, how he wishes that were true.

"Hypocrite," Remus mutters under his breath, taking a long drag of his cigarette and watching the smoke rise. It dances and flickers in the air - a nicotine halo - but he snorts, blowing the smoke away like dust. The fog settles in the air. "I'm not smoking to die. I'm smoking to prove that I won't."

This time, Sirius scoffs, running a hand through his hair and appraising Remus with a sardonic smile. "How fucking poetic."

Because Remus fucks the love of his best mate's life in empty classrooms, with an empty heart and a heavy head - his colour has faded and the grey seems into his hair, his eyes, even into the dimples on his cheek that no one sees anymore.

None of them have smiled in a long time.

And is this how they end?

The marauders?

Is this the only result of a childhood friendship to be revered and feared and cherished? Is this all that is left of four little boys who grew up and played soldier, who met on a train and decided to take on the world? How fucking _pitiful. _

James Potter sleeps with his best mate in Astronomy towers and behind not-so-vivid curtains, but all he wants is Lily Evans and bruises and fire.

Remus Lupin kisses the _redredred _mouth of a girl who used to care, but dreams about _greygreygrey _and _BlackBlackBlack._

And Sirius Black? Sirius Black has everything he's ever wanted, and it's not even his, not really. The boy he loves like a lifeline is only there to keep him afloat, and the boy who loves him is _drowning, drowning. _The girl caught between them all is burning.

(Peter Pettigrew watches from the sidelines as his friends are knocked down like chess pieces and he stands tall; this is his victory, dear.)

Loyalty is a funny thing.

"Lily asked me out, you know," Remus comments suddenly, interrupting the darkness, and all Sirius wishes he could do is tell him how it feels to fall from grace. But he knows his place.

Sirius wants to stutter, wants to curl his lips around words of congratulations and hesitance, wants to demand an answer to a question he hasn't asked, but he can't. He's not brave enough to do that. So he waits for Remus to continue.

"Oh?"

The doorway to paradise, they say, is not truly there at all. It is a string to keep you going, to keep you from faltering - a rope to keep your head held high as you search for something that will never be there. It's the strings of a puppet who hasn't yet learnt that it can't move its limbs on its own. Paradise is simply the perseverance of the pitiful.

"I said no." There is no disbelief here, just cigarette smoke and parted lips and faded hearts.

Sirius knows he should cross the darkness between them, maybe wrap an arm around his friend - _friend, _how _loyal, _pup - but he is as chained to his bed as Lucifer is to hell and bars and brimstone (as chained as he is to James.) "Why?" he asks.

"I realised I was in love with somebody else," Remus replies with a smirk, and he presses the dying amber to his _palecolddead _lips. This time, the ashes fall like glass.

He wishes he could crush his lips to Remus' and press their bodies together until there is no space for the darkness to lurk, until there is no place else for their hearts to beat but next to each other, out of time and out of tune, but familiar and beautiful.

Their souls would shine, you know; they would light up the room with vibrancy and hope and _brightcolouralive. _

But wouldn't that just be too easy?

"Right," Sirius chokes out, throat thick with guilt and glass and smoke. "Right. I'm sorry."

Remus' laugh is _dyingdyingdead _and _god, _how he wishes he could be the person Remus needs. But - they are both too destructive, too cold and too frail and too _faded _to ever shine with a thing like love. They are fallen gods, no longer made to rule.

"Why? S'not your bloody fault." His lips curl around the harlequin cigarette as though he is screaming. "I am half agony, half hope, after all."

Sirius frowns, like a puppeteer pulling at his strings and turning down the corners of his mouth. "That's a shit quote, you know. Austen didn't know a thing about love."

"Neither did we," Remus says softly. And that is that.

(Remus and Sirius may be faded glass and darkness, but Sirius and James are like fire and ice, and when they come together, it'll never be forgotten.)

* * *

They only ever speak about it once.

James is sitting on the tower and Remus is hovering over him - an odd avenging angel with eyes of stone and fingers that twitch too much - and they looked at each other and ask -

- _why?_

Naturally, James leans back and thinks about Gryffindor and loyalty and all those fucking things that won't mean anything when he's dead. His heart is faded and split between too many people. "To save him," he answers slowly, because he knows that if he pulls away from Sirius, he will shatter like glass and only Remus will be there to pick up the pieces.

But Remus, during one of his odd moments of both self-hatred and selfishness, replies, "To save myself."

James is fire and Sirius is ice, so they won't work, shouldn't work - and yet they are drawn to one another like best mates and soulmates and people that belong, but don't. Neither of them have the heart to decide either way.

Aren't they oh so fucking pitiful?

And poor little Remus howls at the moon and wishes that stars shined as vividly down here too.

* * *

Some nights, as they lie between sheets that have been white-washed and faded and hang too loosely, they realise that things like gods and angels don't exist - they are humans and they are fragile and they are flawed. That is all.

And loyalty is a strange word.

Remus continues to paint his lips black with hatred and nicotine, but what did you expect, sweetie? He has been torn to shreds and pieced back together so many times that he is more stitches than skin, more bandages than blood.

His poor little heart is faded and disused and no one is around to fix it again.

James and Sirius, on the other hand, continue as they always did and find comfort in each other; in stone and Black and grey and making a name for themselves. They are simply James-and-Sirius, conjoined and twisted like marionettes on strings.

They love each other, in a way. Like brothers love teasing and lovers love love and enemies love the thrill of the chase.

Even after James lights himself on fire in the form of Lily Evans, they are still Padfoot-and-Prongs, however knocked down and however broken. Forever. _Always. _

"James," he whispers, dark and cerulean and hushed. The room is dark and Sirius fumbles with his silver lighter, fingers flittering like wings over the edge of his cigarette. He drops it, lets it be knocked down, unlit, and roll under the bed. The room becomes colder.

Streetlights flicker outside and he flinches, cowering away from the light.

"What, Sirius?"

He tries to light another cigarette but it crumbles in his too-tight fist and breaks, shatters, faling like glass onto the once-white bed sheets.

"Why her?"

The voices still whisper _JamesJamesJames _even when his head feels as empty as his heart.

"You're my best mate," James replies, turning over to face him. His hair is darker than it used to be and slicked with sweat and his eyes are dull and faded. "But I love her."

Sirius places his bare feet on the ground slowly, the cold easing through the numbness running through his veins. He considers reaching for a third cigarette, but suddenly his fingers are too heavy and he wishes he could breathe.

He sighs and twists the knots in his stomach into something like warmth. "So why are we doing this?" How fucking loyal.

James rubs his eyes and doesn't speak for a long time.

"I don't know."

Sirius smiles sourly and belatedly decides it's far too early to break into the Firewhiskey, but he's already pouring himself another glass. The amber liquid smirks at him, whispers _James, _and then slips over the top of the glass and onto the table. He doesn't feel his wings any more. "That's what I bloody thought."

"Fuck off, Sirius," James growls in return, but Sirius is already tying up his battered trainers and drowning himself in Firewhiskey before it's too late.

James is scowling at the ceiling and Sirius still thinks he's beautiful.

"Cheers, then," he says offhandedly, and the walk to the door feels like stepping off the astronomy tower - and yet he doesn't feel much at all these days. James doesn't move. His own eyes skim over the room and _not _over James and his godforsaken glasses and not-so-untarnished Gryffindor loyalty.

_That's the way men are, _a woman's voice echoes sadly.

When he opens the door with chipped paint and a broken lock, he doesn't think much about the knocked down cold cup of coffee on the counter, or the missing glass vase that was there yesterday evening - or morning - or maybe it was Wednesday -

Remus pads out of the living room with a whirlwind of tattered robes and the slam of a door, and Sirius knows he's already gone, already left him here, alone. Though he wishes he didn't, he knows he deserves it.

Him and his faded heart never did do any good.

And isn't it pitiful?


End file.
